
BY RON MARR
COYOTE FOE
THERE’S A LOPSIDED, CENTURY-OLD, ramshackle chicken house sitting about 50 feet from my modest home. It’s loaded with snakes and serves primarily as a hobo hotel for mangy varmints. It’s too close to the house to burn and too expensive to demolish. A local demo crew quoted me a $2,500 fee to knock it down and shove the remnants into a hedge row 300 yards distant. I’d have grudgingly done that, despite the expense, had we not had such a wet winter and spring that the job proved impossible.
The problem, lately, is that the inmates have taken over the asylum. The varmints frequenting the chicken house have gone from being a nuisance to being out of control. Thus, I’ve been forced to engage in pest management via a shotgun and profuse cursing. It’s a target-rich environment that some folks might consider good sport.
I’m not one of them. Though I hate to sully my reputation as a gun-totin’ hillbilly, I’ve never been keen on killing stuff for fun. I’m a trifle selective when it comes to sending varmints to their eternal reward and have a certain criterion.
I’m far from being an avid hunter, and you couldn’t pay me to snuff large mammals. That’s mostly because in my Montana days, I hung out on the porch and traded clever banter with a moose that had twin calves in my backyard. Word got out, apparently, and before long I had whitetails and mule deer lounging around as well. Good times … though we did occasionally disagree on certain aspects of political and economic policy.
Varmints are another story. You could pay me to kill a snake. In fact, I dislike them so much that I might pay you to let me kill yours. I also have few qualms over whacking trespassing skunks, armadillos, raccoons, groundhogs, rats, wild pigs, or possums.
Then there are coyotes. This is where a problem arises.
Although it’s irrational, I’ve long had an affinity for coyotes. I love hearing them sing in the wee hours and enjoy watching them lope across the fields. Although everyone I know shoots them on sight—with good reason, since they’re predatory as hell on calves, lambs, chickens, and the like—I’ve always approached them with a live-and-let-live philosophy. Maybe I’m averse to blasting anything vaguely canine.
That situation changed over the past few months. Some of the local prairie wolves, discovering that easy meals could be had around the rotting chicken house, began drawing ever closer. Fast food on tap emboldened them, and one night I spotted a couple of shadows stalking my dogs. I ran out, half-naked in winter, screaming like a banshee and firing off a measly .22 pistol that was the only thing I had close at hand.
That was too close for comfort.
So now, I’m sporting a new, semi-auto, tactical shotgun with a red-dot, illuminated sight, loaded with alternating rounds of #4 buck and 1.25-ounce slugs. I’ve strategically mounted motion-detecting spotlights in the hope that the coyotes will hightail it when they get hit by 1,500-lumen beams. I gave them a grace period to mend their ways; the last one who wandered up got a warning shot about a foot from his paw. I’d rather scare them off than off them.
Still, I’m a big proponent of border security, and the grace period is up. I try to be an accommodating neighbor, but the varmints have rudely taken advantage of my good nature and doctrine of peaceful coexistence.
I draw the line when the wolves come knocking at the door.
This article was originally published in the June 2023 edition of Missouri Life magazine.